14th Nov 2024 - Vital Night / Speakeasy

• Recent games

Early November is the time for the annual celebration of two major board game designers in this part of the world. First there was Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the actions of a certain Francis Tresham, among others. And then this week, we had Vital Night, as the great man himself (Lacerda - not Tresham) was back in town.

I think this was our 3rd Vital Night? Anyway, on both the previous two I had hoped to play a Lacerda game but missed out - first time because all the games got booked up before I knew they were listed, and the second time because I was in hospital for the birth of my daughter. This year, I was alert to all these risks and made sure none of them happened again! So I finally got to play one of the Vital games. And so, for once, I can actually give a write-up of a brand new game - so new that it's not even been published yet.

As you might imagine, Speakeasy is about the mob in Prohibition-era America. Not in Al Capone's Chicago, but in Manhattan, where a man called Lucky Luciano ruled. (Incidentally, Capone does make an appearance in the game, in the somewhat diminished capacity of captain of one of the rum-running ships.) We are the local mob bosses, trying to make money for the Syndicate from the booze trade. Fittingly, it's a most-money game. It spans the 13-year duration of prohibition, and we each get 1 turn for each year - except the final year, which is for final scoring. So you have exactly 12 turns.

So, as Vital commented at about 10:30, perhaps slightly wryly: it's a quick game, this one. But like all the Vital games, a "turn" consists of as many intricately interlinked actions as you can cram into it - so for every turn you have about a million possible permutations from which to choose a best way to play. This is of course the main appeal of Vital games - and we certainly explored the full million every time.

It was very much as I expected: a richly-thematic game, with a lot of subtle interactions that reward careful thought. And very luxuriously produced, and a table-hog! Dan had somewhat naively put out a 6' by 3' table for us - when Vital and the game turned up, we quickly had to put the table away and replace it with a 6' by 4'.

The mechanics in this one are worker placement and - being a mob game - area control. The area control element is just a way of getting money, but there are various other ways to win. At the heart of it all, though, like the other Vital games, it's about using your very few turns to string together as many actions as possible: which is very satisfying to get it right, and very frustrating to get it wrong. So long as you do okay, you go home feeling very satisfied.

By and large, we did get it right: Vital explained to us that $300 was a good score - hence the biggest cash denomination in the game is $300 - it's the "prize" for doing well. We skipped the final round, but I managed $298 (and, frustratingly, Dan managed $299). If we'd played the final round, I'm sure we'd all have won the $300 prize. Elsa has previously quoted Vital as saying, "100 points in any game is a good score." With that in mind, we all did well.

I was very grateful for the opportunity to play this game, and it was a special privilege to do so with added hints and encouragement from Vital himself. And of all his thematic games, this theme is very much up my street (I've been waiting 15 years since Vinhos for the next in his "alcohol" series). But I feel like, compared to the other games, the downtime is worse on this one: in all the other games that I recall, you do more individual bits in each round; whereas in this one, you have a single - and therefore longer - turn.

In a game like this, with the carefully-constructed action sequences, watching others take their turn is like watching someone doing their tax return. And since my daughter was born, I've become much more sensitive to how I'm using my time (ie. much more impatient). So accountancy as a spectator sport isn't for me. Some of the others seemed fine with it - Dan and Tim didn't seem at all bothered. But Andrew and I both found ourselves frustrated by the long waits. I think we all liked the game - and if we all played it again we would surely play it quicker and enjoy it all the more.

The other Vital game was the even newer Great Library. For this one, I'm not sure if they had a rule book - I think they just had Vital explaining the rules. I gathered the library in question was the ancient one in Alexandria, not a modern-day council library or the room in the country house where the body gets found. Other than that, I couldn't glean very much about it - maybe someone from that table will add something here.

Owing to the 6' by 4' requirements, we had the Vital games in the upstairs room this year - so the lighter games were downstairs. One of these was supposed to be the Vital game Railways Of Portugal, which Michel has brought in every Vital Night so far - but sadly he was ill so didn't make it. Railways Of Portugal is my favourite RotW game, which I've also hoped to play and missed out on for the last two Vital Nights, for the reasons mentioned earlier. So, on the off chance Michel is reading this, I would be up for playing that another time. And wish you better!

So Michel's table was playing light games including Arboretum and Azul. Paul-T reported that they had got through 5 of them when he looked in upstairs, by which point we were about on our 7th turn of Speakeasy. The other table downstairs was 6 people playing Flamme Rouge: Grand Tour, which is Flamme Rouge with a few extra bits added on and a kind of series, not just individual races. Not sure how many they got through.

The other games upstairs were Raiders Of The North Sea and a second week for Inferno. And notwithstanding the competition from the Vital games, the last to finish this week was Inferno. Although it depends what you mean by "finish", as neither of the Vital games were properly completed (we skipped a round and I think Great Library had to finish early). But we could feel smug about not taking the longest 🙂

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